Reviews tagging 'Sexism'

Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang

10 reviews

rice_cooker's review

4.5

one of the scariest books i've read in my life 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror, Sexual harassment, Medical content, Gore, Medical trauma, Fire/Fire injury, and Vomit

Moderate: Emotional abuse, Classism, Death, Racism, Blood, Body shaming, Death of parent, Grief, Animal cruelty, Bullying, Eating disorder, Sexism, Sexual assault, Murder, Violence, and Car accident

Minor: Body shaming, Pregnancy, Pedophilia, Death of parent, Suicide attempt, Suicidal thoughts, Cannibalism, Emotional abuse, and Suicide

caroisreading's review

dark mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

What a wild ride. And what a hell of a debut novel by Ling Ling Huang. I'm still processing the many layers that the author has sliced open, with all its grotesque detail, what it means to be a woman stripped of her own nature, power, choice, financial security, fertility, ethnicity, family and body. Essentially, the reality we live today, only digestible as a work of dystopian fiction. 

Our narrator is a Chinese-American daughter of immigrants, two pianists who escaped the Cultural Revolution. She's absorbed their passion for the instrument and art, and rises as a talented young prodigy, enduring bullying for being praised, different, and poor. After tragedy, she has to give up piano for odd jobs to survive, and finds herself working in retail at Holistik, a beauty shop that feels surreal with its elite clientele, innovative services and beautiful staff of women. As she literally drinks the Kool-aid, she mentally and physically becomes the same brand of beauty, at a huge cost. 

This is a disturbing story, a little too real in its descriptions of an unrelenting capitalist society, with beauty and youth reserved only for the 1%, and a dismissive eye toward the basic healthcare and wellness of the lower and middle class. It sarcastically mimics the marketing extremes of what it means to be "organic" and "zero waste" to the point of nauseating realism. It serves up, very simply, the erasure of ethnic beauty and backgrounds in favor of a homogenous Nordic-type everygirl. It shows us nature's brutality and retaliation when man tries to bend it to his will. It explores the relationship between art and pain, and the sacrifice of self for something to be considered beautiful.

This is a must-read, for a reality check on many of the rights we see ourselves being stripped of, and issues our society are grappling with today. Definitely check the content warnings.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal cruelty, Sexism, Vomit, Fatphobia, Blood, Body horror, Car accident, Chronic illness, Death, Murder, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Cannibalism, Death of parent, Eating disorder, Gore, Racism, Body shaming, Xenophobia, Animal death, Medical content, Medical trauma, Physical abuse, Bullying, Gaslighting, Injury/Injury detail, and Rape

emilywemily6's review

mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

In some ways, this book gave more than I expected, and in other ways, it didn’t quite fulfill what I was hoping for while I was reading. I really liked the conversations on the cosmetic industry, European standards of beauty, the privileges afforded to the privileged, etc. However, there is a lot jammed into this book, and by the end I felt a little unfulfilled in these discussions and plot points that could have gone farther than they did. Also, the main character’s lack of awareness/acceptance of the changes she went through was irksome. If I was suddenly 6 inches taller I would have been startled and run away from Holistik, for one thing, let alone all the other things that happened. She also felt so bad about her relationship with her parents but did nothing to truly fix it or come to terms with it. So I wasn’t a huge fan of the main character. I also felt like the book was over-sexualized. While this novel gave me a lot to think about, it won’t be quite a favorite.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Racism, Vomit, Toxic friendship, Body horror, Alcohol, Grief, Medical trauma, Misogyny, Bullying, Death, Cursing, Medical content, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Injury/Injury detail, Kidnapping, Drug use, Gore, Classism, Fire/Fire injury, Sexual violence, Sexual content, Toxic relationship, Child abuse, and Gaslighting

Moderate: Miscarriage, Infertility, Pregnancy, Cannibalism, Car accident, and Animal cruelty

aleesquer's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Classism, Child abuse, Body horror, Body shaming, Cannibalism, Car accident, Drug use, Chronic illness, Death, Medical content, Death of parent, Dementia, Emotional abuse, Fatphobia, Racism, Fire/Fire injury, Gaslighting, Misogyny, Murder, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual content, and Sexual harassment

bluejayreads's review

3.0

I’m always down for media skewering the beauty industry. The damage the pursuit of beauty does to to the body and the psyche, consumerism masquerading as self-care, a mantra of “wellness” that only adds more work and stress to your life while claiming if you just did it right you’d never have a negative emotion again … these are all ideas that I find fascinating and compelling and I love to explore. 

Unfortunately, that’s not really what I got with Natural Beauty. 

Don’t get me wrong, it tries! It absolutely tries really hard to say a lot of things. But I think the problem was that it was try to cover way too many things in a book that isn’t nearly long enough. In addition to the commentary on the beauty industry, it also tries to talk about the value of music, beauty as social capital, the nature of beauty itself (through both physical beauty and music), complex relationships with parents, the inherent power dynamics of money, possibly sustainability – and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my head. 

One of the primary drivers of the book is a fascinating form of body horror serving as a counterpoint to Holistik’s beauty mandate, which was a wonderful idea and a form of body horror that I don’t see a lot, so I appreciated it both as a body horror fan and a beauty culture skeptic. But for it to have been done well, it needed to be a slow burn. And Natural Beauty is emphatically not that. In fact, in the first two-thirds or so, the bit that should have been the tense, gradual build-up to the true horror at the end, the changes happen rapidly – and our unnamed protagonist barely seems to notice them anyway, simply commenting on how her body has changed and going on about her business. What seems to be the message of the book has to struggle for page time among flashbacks to the protagonist’s past, her thoughts about piano and music in general, and interactions with her coworkers. 

Then about halfway through, the focus slowly begins to shift. In case you couldn’t figure it out from the back cover or the first few pages of the book, there’s something very weird and very suspicious going on at Holistik. The story shifts away from the protagonist’s body and the idea of beauty and towards finding out exactly what is happening at Holistik. But even that is unsatisfying because the answers we eventually get don’t actually tie up all the questions that I had. (What about the deer? What about the hand cream?) The book gets weird, and not in the unsetting way I enjoy, but in a way that feels overdone and unbelievable. I was halfway through reading a particular scene before I realized it was supposed to be the climax and not just another outlandish even in the series of outlandish events that was the last third of the book. 

The narration is straightforward and passionless, which is not always a bad thing, but in this case served to keep at a distance any emotions that would have made it impactful. It also made it really difficult to judge which scenes were actually happening and which were some kind of drug-induced unreality sequence. And as I mentioned previously, the body horror aspect could have been fantastic if it was paced better. But what really made it so disappointing was the fact that it couldn’t keep a focus. It started off with the beauty industry and the costs and dangers of being beautiful. But it seems afraid to go too deep into it or lean too hard into the horrifying, revolting underbelly. Whenever it approached anything particularly grim, it would back off to talk about music or the protagonist’s parents or her past. Then it shifted to “let’s find out how fucked up this company really is!” with the bonus that the protagonist wasn’t even particularly interested in this line of investigating, but got dragged along as her friends started to pry. Then at the end it abruptly switches back to body horror and beauty culture, skipping over the actual change that would have made me actually feel something about it and relying on the protagonist’s passionless commentary and opinions about how just entirely not participating in beauty is good, actually. 

I wanted this to be something more than it was. I wanted a literary horror commentary on the beauty industry, beauty culture, and how the modern mandate of “wellness” just sells women more work and more reasons to appeal to the male gaze while convincing them it’s actually “self-care” and “empowerment.” What I got was an admittedly well-written but poorly paced and unfocused story about a young woman who got caught up with a really fucked up beauty brand. The ideas were strong and the concepts had a lot of potential. But the execution, at least in my opinion, didn’t do them justice. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror, Death, Medical content, and Medical trauma

Moderate: Drug use, Sexual content, Sexism, Misogyny, and Sexual assault

Minor: Vomit, Death of parent, Cannibalism, Pregnancy, and Bullying

Unreality Narrator is on several cases drugged without her knowledge and/or agreement

whitneymouse's review

challenging dark reflective sad fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror, Death, Dysphoria, and Death of parent

Moderate: Vomit, Fatphobia, Racism, Animal cruelty, Sexism, Classism, Emotional abuse, Medical trauma, Blood, Cannibalism, Xenophobia, Car accident, Fire/Fire injury, Infertility, and Miscarriage

Minor: Adult/minor relationship, Injury/Injury detail, and Pedophilia

talonsontypewriters's review against another edition

dark reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Medical trauma, Medical content, Gore, Death, Body horror, Injury/Injury detail, Classism, Emotional abuse, Dysphoria, Body shaming, Fire/Fire injury, and Sexual assault

Moderate: Death of parent, Eating disorder, Drug use, Pregnancy, Grief, Violence, Cultural appropriation, Misogyny, Racism, Xenophobia, Animal cruelty, Blood, Vomit, and Sexism

Minor: Animal death, Car accident, Suicide, Domestic abuse, Fatphobia, Alcohol, Cannibalism, and Child abuse

Various levels of questionable/lack of consent, including outside of a solely sexual context. General exploitation and manipulation. Lots of themes around beauty standards and "healthy" lifestyles, including unhealthy levels of adherence thereto.

chris_reads's review against another edition

dark mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

The most insidiously disturbing book I've read to date. Good writing and themes of class, consumerism, immigration, sexual exploitation and beauty standards for women. Characters were sympathetic but passive and not very likeable. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body shaming, Medical trauma, Rape, Body horror, Classism, Stalking, and Bullying

Moderate: Sexism, Sexual assault, Death of parent, Gaslighting, Medical content, Dysphoria, Toxic friendship, Drug use, and Eating disorder

Minor: Addiction, Animal cruelty, Car accident, Murder, Racism, and Vomit

jordan21's review

adventurous challenging dark mysterious tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

I dont usually go for sci fi, dystopian storylines but this book pulled me into its world and kept my interest until the very end. A bizarrely profound narrative criticizing capitalism,  body image, racism and unachievable Western Beauty standards. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Sexual assault, Sexism, Xenophobia, and Body horror

Moderate: Racism

Minor: Cannibalism

noshinbean's review

dark reflective tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.75

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror, Death, Drug use, and Sexual assault

Minor: Ableism, Cannibalism, Car accident, Dementia, Gaslighting, Injury/Injury detail, Murder, Pregnancy, Sexism, and Sexual violence